Jay Shah’s defamation case hearing adjourned to Oct 16

NewsBharati    11-Oct-2017
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Ahmedabad, Oct 11: The metropolitan court in Ahmedabad on Wednesday adjourned the hearing in the Rs 100 crore defamation suit filed by Jay Shah, son of BJP National President Amit Shah against the web portal ‘The Wire’.

The hearing was adjourned as Jay Shah’s counsel advocate S V Raju could not be present in the court as he was busy in the High Court of Gujarat.

Jay Shah’s lawyer sought time from the Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate S K Gadhvi on the pretext that senior advocate S V Raju was busy in the High Court as such he could not be present in the court. The court granted the time and fixed next hearing on October 16.

It may be mentioned that Jay Shah has filed a Rs 100 crore defamation suit against the newsportal ‘The Wire’ on October 9, after the portal published a news report alleging that his firm Temple Enterprise’s turnover grew exponentially after the BJP came to power in 2014. The magistrate has ordered a court inquiry in the matter under Cr PC section 202.

Jay Shah prayed for criminal action against the respondents for defaming and maligning the reputation of his firm and his own through the article which he termed as “scandalous, frivolous, misleading, derogatory, libellous and consisting of several defamatory statements”.

Jay Shah has made the author of the article Rohini Singh, founding editors of the news portal Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia and M K Venu, managing editor Monobina Gupta, public editor Pamela Philipose and Foundation for Independent Journalism, a non-profit company that publishes ‘The Wire’.

Shah sought action against the respondents under IPC 500 (defamation), 109 (abetment), 39 (voluntarily causing grievous hurt) and 120 B (criminal conspiracy).

Shah said that ‘The Wire’ first published an article, which was later “edited and reworded” to the current form. “The accused conspired to get a fabricated, reworded and edited version of the defamatory article to be published in place of the original version,” he said.

He said the article did not reflect the loss that his company incurred in FY 2015-16, and that the net profit and gross turnover for the said financial year was “wilfully and with malafide intentions” delinked into two different unconnected paragraphs.